Saturday, March 03, 2012

British WWI resisters. A pointless, immoral war that of course hurt Britain much more than America. (Why November’s still Poppy Month there.) Regular readers might remember the story of the Christmas truce, the last British WWI combat vet, who lived to be over 100 (‘I would never go back’), and WWII combat vet Tony Bennett (who sees that 9/11 was payback, and ‘anybody who thinks that war is romantic obviously hasn’t gone through one’). With Taki I agree the world would have been better off if the Central Powers had won. (No Nazi Germany, and Palestine would have remained a sleepy province remotely run by the Turks.) My take on resisters. Not a lot of sympathy for the Vietnam ones (but the authentic right, including the John Birch Society, was split on it and MacArthur begged Johnson to get out). Those leftists weren’t really for peace but wanted the other side to win. Get out of town. I like the working-class Dems sent over there better. Anyway: principled resisters, such as soldiers saying no to another deployment now, are heroes. I’m anti-war, not anti-military. The military has a real job: guard us, guard the coast. So part of the resisters’ heroism is taking the punishment the military has to give out in order to do its proper job. That goes for Bradley Manning.

Bacevich: With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse.

Buchanan, “For What, All These Wars?’: Since Ronald Reagan went home, the United States has attacked or invaded Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and Libya. How have the Chinese suffered these 20 years by not having been in on the action?

Of course we libertarians aren’t trying to stop people’s right to be wrong and buy contraception. The issue is forcing a religion to go against its own teaching. (As somebody wrote in the MCJ, if the mainline still mattered, how would they feel if the government made them pay, even indirectly through insurance, for reparative therapy for homosexuals? Me: coercion’s wrong of course; a tiny minority, something like 3%, have that problem and the same right to live in peace as us; the church’s teaching stands.) Obviously the government wants that. (Make the church stop being the church and get with the latter-day Protestant program.) But LRC’s Christopher Manion points out opposition to contraception isn’t just a Catholic thing. Before the middle of the last century it was a generally Christian thing. It’s for everyone to consider or ignore, to embrace or to reject.